How to Build a System for Launching Innovation Challenges - Food and Drug Administration

How to Build a System for Launching Innovation Challenges - Food and Drug Administration

Jul 23, 2019Season 1Episode 4

IdeaScale

Listen to the FDA's journey as they transform their workplace with the help of their employees by launching 26+ challenges. They've addressed diverse subject matter; from communications, to professional development, to strategy direction, and beyond. Featuring Mark Ascione and Kimberly Taylor of the Food and Drug Administration.

Listen to the FDA's journey as they transform their workplace with the help of their employees by launching 26+ challenges. They've addressed diverse subject matter; from communications, to professional development, to strategy direction, and beyond. Featuring Mark Ascione and Kimberly Taylor of the Food and Drug Administration.

IdeaScale:0:17

Hi there everyone. Welcome to our ideasscale nation podcast where we hear from innovators, entrepreneurs, and change makers in every industry. Today we're speaking to Mark Ascione and Kimberly Taylor from the Food and Drug Administration. And they have built a program that they launched at the FDA Center for drug evaluation and research to leverage the collective wisdom of their 4,500 employees. Together they collaboratively solve programs that have made the center for drug evaluation and research more efficient. They've addressed organizational change issues, proposed proposed new professional development programs, and they've essentially changed the face of their workplace. So, let's take the opportunity to learn a little bit more about them. Mark, can, you tell us a little bit about yourselves, your role, and your maybe your background?

Speaker 3:1:07

Thank you, Jessica. I appreciate the introduction. Uh, so as you mentioned, my name is Mark Ascione. I've been with the food and Drug Administration for well over six years now. Uh, coming in with a background actually in digital advertising, you worked at a strategy and analytic group at a advertising firm. Uh, my role at FDA is focusing on, uh, internal evaluations as well as doing various analytic projects. And that of course, our role on crowdsourcing, which we'll get a little bit more into and how we got started and our focus on that. But our time is mainly working with clients internally and finding ways to help make sure we do our work better.

IdeaScale:1:49

Awesome. And Kim?

Speaker 4:1:52

Hi. Yeah. So I'm Kim Taylor and mark and I started just about the same time. So I've been there six, almost seven years now. I have a very varied background. Um, I, other than this public health, um, position now, I, um, have a background in media consulting and environmental management. So I'm old at the Food and Drug Administration at CDER. I am the director of the, um, program evaluation and implementation team. So do just what it sounds like. We conduct evaluations, um, and we implement various programs. And with crowdsourcing we are trying to leverage the wisdom at the, of the crowd at CDER and trying to get, um, the people actually doing the work. Um, with the, with the, um, the real knowledge of what's going on to contribute to innovation and change.

IdeaScale:2:44

That makes a lot of sense actually that combo of skills, like a background in communications and then a background in evaluating projects. These are the skills you would need of course. Um, and you both mentioned how the program got started, so maybe you could tell us what, you know, what is this program that you've created and why did you start it?

Speaker 4:3:04

Well, so as Mark and I started to work together, we attended this, um, this um, partnership for public service event around employee engagement. Few months I think after we started. And I don't know how, but crowdsourcing came up and we both looked at each other and we thought this would be so perfect for our plans. Um, and again, it's because there's such a big gap between the people making decisions and the people doing the work in government. And so crowdsourcing we thought would be a great way to connect them. Um, but we weren't sure if the culture at CDER would, be a good fit for crowdsourcing. So we conducted quite a bit of primary research by talking to a lot of other federal agencies that had, or either using crowdsourcing or had used crowdsourcing in the past to try to get a better understanding of best practices and challenges and things to do things not to do that kind of thing. Um, and then we decided to launch crowdsourcing at CDER

:4:00

Um, basically challenge-based crowdsourcing. So we had executive sponsors putting out um, questions, um, around a particular topic for which they wanted ideas or information and um, asking a target body, you know, students review.

Speaker 3:4:17

Okay. Yeah. It's interesting cause we, you know, with the FDA and trigger the CDER

:4:26

CDER has such a important complex mission that I think one of the things we are looking at was how do we shake it up a little bit, particularly being a little disruptive and finding a more fun and almost energetic way to engage people. Um, so our, our initial was, our initial focus was how do we really make some changes and be a disruptive force?

IdeaScale:4:51

Well, it sounds like it has done a good job of closing that gap. Those frontline employees often know a lot more and, and want to be involved. They long for that engagement. Um, but so it's interesting to me that you've decided to model on a sort of a time, time, limited challenge basis. What, why did you decide to do it that way and then how do you find the challenges that you want to solve?

Speaker 3:5:15

So, you know, a lot of it came down to the research and did beforehand. And we heard from a lot of agencies that do crowdsourcing not to do it as an open process that requires, and I think also just the level of engagement they get from employees. It wasn't worth that open effort. Whereas having that focused challenged based approach, one requires less resources of us. I mean we don't have a fully dedicated staff to begin with, but I think it's that that time element really gets people to engage you. You have a window of one to two weeks to participate. It's an hour, hour as opposed to something that's just sitting there and sitting there and

Speaker 4:5:57

then we could build, you know, communication plans around those two weeks instead of around always. Right.

IdeaScale:6:06

And you get to deliver on results because you have it, you know, usually a timeline for engaging, you know, your crowd is also a timeline for trying to deliver on some of those things.

Speaker 3:6:17

Yeah.

IdeaScale:6:18

So what are some examples of challenges you've run or some, um, programs that you've launched as part of this?

Speaker 3:6:26

So why don't we keep coming back to this? Early on I was with the pharmacy student experiential program. This is a program where various staff within FDA will sponsor students essentially as preceptors and give pharmacists students a chance to see what work is like within the agency. And so they get set up for one month or one month projects do this program and the directors of that program came to us looking for how do they increase the number of preceptors that are available to help with these students. Um, you know, they had to turn people away the most recent year. Wow. Yeah. It was, they, they had more people than they could handle really. That's a big turnaround. Yeah. And that that was a, was an early win. Yeah, totally. When we were able to work with them to identify the barriers and really work among the staff through crowdsourcing to find solutions to get over those barriers. And I know that increased the participation by over 10% that they shared with us a pharmaceutical conference, um, as an innovation they did is how they leverage crowdsourcing for this.

Speaker 4:7:41

Oh, I feel like the challenges we've done, I've run the gamut. I mean another example would be every five years I'm the FCA and industry come to the table to negotiate, um, our user fee commitments. And so we use crowdsourcing in that context to sort of hear from the people doing the work, what they felt should be, um, my should, we should bring up at the table or being needed that we might want to look at before negotiations started. Um, we've used it in term for inter office communication challenges. We've used it for um, doing green going green. Right. And how to improve our, um, sustainability, um, procedures on campus. Um, I mean we've done I think, but 26 challenges.

Speaker 3:8:27

Yeah. It's only around 29, 26,

IdeaScale:8:29

26 challenges. Wow, that's a lot. And it's interesting that they have run the gamut and that some of them you'll come back to then year over year or whenever you have to like take a conversation to the table.

Speaker 3:8:43

Yeah. I think a, I mean the use of fee negotiation, one is when we're already planned on revisiting, you know, we just finished in negotiations and feels like yesterday but already year to this current round. And I need to start to start planning for negotiations again. So it's something that where we want to pair for a May sure that we can provide the best input to the process and ultimately best serve the public.

Speaker 4:9:09

And, and so recent clients have expressed an interest to do recurring challenges around similar topics too. So, yeah.

IdeaScale:9:17

And so how would this information have made it through before or how, you know, when, and maybe let's lead into then of course, how it gets in there now an idea arrives and then what happens next?

Speaker 3:9:31

So that's a good question and I pause because there's a lot of complexity to my answer to that. Before we had cross Dorsey and then the primary math, it would be surveys, they would often get lost among the crowd. Uh, could be focus groups and interviews, which, you know, it's tough to reach a large audience with that. That's particularly the resources required to do it, or word of mouth. It's whoever makes noise in the right place and it ultimately gets up to two leadership.

Speaker 4:10:03

Hmm. This isn't just in the context of that one challenge. I think this is in general, yes. It's unilateral decision making, right? It's decisions made at the top by the people that think they know what's happening but may not really know what's happening and don't necessarily have, um, you know, they, they're the people that they are and they're, they're not necessarily leveraging the ideas that other people might have. So the more the merrier. Right. Right. Well

IdeaScale:10:30

imagine that that's appreciated from both sides. I feel like a lot of leaders want more data points and want to be ground truth things. Some of the things that they believe. And of course the people who are on the front lines want to share their experience and make sure that that's being reflected in the organization. Has that been the case with this program for you?

Speaker 3:10:50

Yeah, I mean we actually got feedback along those lines. We've, um, the people that have participated often said, this is great. You know, it's a good way to be able to get involved in what leadership is thinking happen in terms of the processes that are going to ultimately impact them. We often also get a lot of ideas for who, hey, how about we new concepts, you know, around this or you know, they, they love to see, yeah, keep coming. Yeah. Answer that in the participation.

Speaker 4:11:20

And since we are on the program evaluation and limitation staff, we are actually, um, we have some people on our staff that aren't going to be doing an evaluation of our program. Oh, it says third parties we can get. Right, right. We're interested to get some feedback and hopefully some suggestions, um, for the future that way too.

IdeaScale:11:40

Wow, that's really interesting. Maybe we'll have you back once they, once they've submitted their analysis for what you could do or improve. Um, I, I, you did mention too that like sometimes people come you and they're like, well, let's use crowdsourcing for this. Um, are there things that aren't a good fit for crowdsourcing in your opinion?

Speaker 4:12:01

Definitely. Um, a lot of times people just want information that there were, there's no need for interaction or discussion. And so from that perspective, we tell them, you know, survey or some other tool.

Speaker 3:12:14

Um, and I think there also

Speaker 4:12:16

people that approach us with very big complex topics and they're uneasy and it's like we can't get away to drill down to something that's adjustable and concrete questions that aren't too overwhelming, then I think we,

Speaker 3:12:28

we steer them in another direction. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that actually leads into a lot of the shift of our program that we've been focusing on recently, uh, partly in the challenges we take, but also how we approach them. Kim mentioned being able to, to drill down to really the concrete questions. Well, one of the reasons we look at that as we're thinking about what are you going to do once you get this? But yeah, and I think that's been the biggest challenge we've faced is our focus initially was let's get participation and get these ideas in here. We never really work to what happens after the challenge is over. So when we're making that shift to focus on, well, what is that workflow for four? The idea is, and what is the action that's gonna happen afterward and really be facilitators of this whole process of, from the concept of this is the information we're trying to get at the input we're looking for too. There's actual transparent action at the end that staff could see this wasn't a waste of their time.

IdeaScale:13:32

Right. So you're starting with the end in mind. I mean, we talked to a lot of our customers about doing what you guys do, which is starting with a sponsor who has a business need or a challenge that they want to solve. Um, and then working on that with them to craft a problem statement that people will respond to with the goal in mind, of course, of being able to deliver on that, um, on, on the best ideas on the other end. So what have you found so far, um, for making sure that ideas can reach implementation or launch?

Speaker 3:14:04

It's certainly labor intensive. Yeah. You know, so those are our first test cases actually internal to our office, which is about 130 people. We had our office director looking to improve interaction across multiple really kind of different offices, centers, [inaudible] programming and strategic analysis. And then there's the office of business informatics. So how do we bring the two together? How do we, um, bring down the barriers? And then there was a topic around how do we improve our all hands meetings. So we start out with here's the process you want to go forth with first it's generating ideas and refining those ideas through comments and taking it offline, working with her os or say which ideas are already, you know, we want to select it that, that great, we don't even need to get more impact input on which ones, you know, just aren't going to be feasible right now let's move in to a parking lot.

Speaker 3:15:03

And then which ones do we want to move to a voting phase and put it back to the crowd. Decide which ones to prioritize. So we're sort of in the middle of the process. You know, we've had two fairly lengthy facilitation sessions with, uh, with our sponsor and the key moderator of that to get the ideas and move them from stage to stage to stage. Um, we're at a point now where we're going to be presenting the results at an all hands meeting in a couple of weeks, but making sure that we stay on it, of what's happening with these ideas and that they're ultimately his conclusions. Everything that people said

IdeaScale:15:42

that is really interesting. And I want, one of the things that I love about this modification to your program is that it finds multiple touch points for the crowd within that decision making process, not just in what the ideas can be, but then later on of course, prioritizing them and helping, you know, late in the workload of implementing ideas by making sure it's

Speaker 3:16:02

the best is that see the light of day. Okay.

Speaker 4:16:05

Yeah, I think ideas, scale stages has been really helpful and pushing us to that and enabling us to do it that way.

Speaker 3:16:15

Yes, certainly.

IdeaScale:16:16

So are there other things that you're thinking you're going to change or modify about your program going forward?

Speaker 3:16:24

So one of the questions we've been struggling with is where does, where does our program ultimately live with in the center we've observed at the various opinionation events, um, talking to other programs that you live within an HR group that's responsible and owns kind of that employee relationship and how to prove that they live within an innovation group with a group that's charged with taking ideas and seeding them. Then finding the home help pushing them forward or me it group that is focused on getting feedback on the various technological rollouts they're doing were none of those things. Um, you know, we, we don't really have an ownership in any part of the process that we get involved in, but we're more of a facilitator and it's kind of what I'm looking at, how they look at crowd sourcing as a service and how we engage our sponsors and when crossers as appropriate and when they should really use it to, to get these ideas and um, be transparent about how it's changing your organization.

Speaker 4:17:33

And the Nice thing is we sit in an office that bills itself as internal consultants to the centers. They do what a lot of management consultants would do. So we have our hand in so many different change in its initiatives going around, going on in the center. And so we're able to say, hey, this would be a good opportunity for crowds. We're seeing more, they come to us because everybody knows who we are because we sit in the same office we're on also, you know, the, the, the evaluation team. And so we kind of see, um, crowdsourcing is in that, in the evaluation kind of realm. So fits from that perspective as well. But it could fit in other places too, but it's just [inaudible] it's her baby and yeah.

IdeaScale:18:16

Well it's interesting that you bring that up. We do a lot of discovery with our customers obviously, and we just released our 2019 report on crowdsourced innovation. And you are so right, it's all over the board. In terms of where this sits. I, the majority do have some sort of innovation practice. I think it's about 38%. Um, but then the restaurants split between, yeah, it, HR, product operations, r and d. Um, but really it's about, you know, not just finding the ideas but matching them to the organizational resources. And it was interesting to look at those folks who have innovation departments and find out what those innovation departments do is. It sounds like it's a lot of what you're doing, you know, it's, it's collecting ideas but it's also connecting them, it's prioritizing them and it's communicating around them. And so that is sort of the work that you've created for yourself by launching this program?

Speaker 3:19:12

Yeah, I mean I agree with that. I think, um, we have thought about how we fit in, in terms of the role of innovation within the center. And we get involved as an office a lot. As Kim said, we're an office that works as internal consultants. We have teams that, um, you know, go through the lean process analysis and how to improve it. We do implementation work well. So it's certainly part of it, but not to the point where we're completely charged with owning that innovation. Right. So it changes the mindset enough to make it that much more complicated.

IdeaScale:19:46

I was wondering, actually, we ask almost everybody on the podcast what the word innovation means to you. Um, cause there's a lot of feelings around that word. Some people don't want to use it, some people love it. How about you guys? Does it resonate? Is it part of your job? What, what do you think?

Speaker 4:20:04

It definitely does resonate. So we worked for the government and um, I think that innovation in government is a little bit different than it is outside of government. So in government there it's bureaucratic and especially where we work, we brought for registry. And so I think innovation can be things that are done differently than they've been done for 50 years. You know what I mean? Anytime you make that sort of, that can be innovation and that's, I mean, that's not a bad thing, right? For things have been Young's aren't my, because maybe they work or because it's institutionalized or it's part of a statute or whatnot. And so, um, I think that, um, there's, that means there's a lot of opportunity for innovation. Um, where we work. So again, I said we were regulatory agency with specific mandates. So a lot of innovation for us is about increasing efficiency, increasing benefit to stakeholders, um, and sometimes you know, solving problems or coming up with new ideas to benefit, um, internal operations, culture, public health, et cetera.

Speaker 3:21:05

Right. It's interesting. I almost say it's sometimes a word that's met with fear evil. You know, it's very busy agency. People work a lot, a while long hours and third constantly moving. So having this even slightest change coming in can, can lead something to get anxious about, particularly since a lot of times innovation can be presented without much details behind it. And yeah, it makes promises that don't necessarily get fulfilled. So people do have apprehension when they hear that word.

IdeaScale:21:41

Yeah. And I think it's, it's your instinct is right to, on what you want to prioritize in your program going forward. Because I think for exactly that reason that you just said that a lot of people see it as a, you know, a lot of noise without necessarily an output. So the best way to do that is to deliver on ideas, you know, delivery breeds trust in these programs. What, um, what other advice would you guys give to government organizations in particular who wanted to start a crowdsourcing program?

Speaker 3:22:15

I think one of the big things we have is that we've built toolkit. Yeah. Initiation template we use for starting with new clients. It helps us frame the idea as communication plan templates. Um, now we're uh,

Speaker 4:22:29

Delaney, we've got infographics that go through the process. So we have potential challenge executive so we can really walk them through what it means to run a challenge with the pictures, which is nice. Yeah.

IdeaScale:22:41

So it's like a little training program that you've created for somebody who wants to solve a problem essentially.

Speaker 3:22:47

Exactly. And one of the newer programs we're working on is how do you want to like the use cases for crowdsourcing, essentially saying, I want to call sourcing to talk about a new process and how to ask them things like that or giving them different use cases so that they can answer the question that might be kind of stuck

Speaker 4:23:06

the back of their head. But I also think another important, um, ingredient is sort of an executive champion. So somewhere we are super lucky because our directs, our direct supervisor is very supportive and you know, he's able to, and we find the money every year to, to keep renewing this, which is great. And we're also, we had so many opportunities, challenge opportunities for a better fingertips. So not everyone has that, but really having somebody that up above a senior that has your back is really important. Yeah, I agree with that.

IdeaScale:23:39

And then when it's time to launch a challenge, didn't know how long does it take to walk somebody through that process of how to package it up and put it out to the crowd?

Speaker 3:23:48

Yes. And that can vary. You know, it depends on their experience with it and how flaunt their challenge statement is. But say we from the point of completing that initiation template, which is asking for your objective thoughts on the questions, thoughts on how this would be introduced to the crowd. We said it takes about a month before launching. Um, because that's the time to build a communication plan, but also to start, implement a communication plan, you weeks to get that message out.

Speaker 4:24:19

But we really make it so easy for them. I mean, we do, we obviously we have them, they're the face of the challenge. They have to come up with the questions, the intro paragraph and all of that. But we help them create the communication plan. I mean it's, we're, we're set, we know exactly what we're doing and we really, they don't have to do very much other than moderate the challenge thing, either the thought process behind coming up with the challenge to begin with,

IdeaScale:24:45

right? So that they can figure out which eye, how they can deliver on these ideas that they're going to get. And then how long does the, the period is in an open call for ideas? Is it two weeks that you said or does that vary ever?

Speaker 4:24:59

We usually do two weeks. We've done one week, we've done three weeks, but never longer than that.

IdeaScale:25:05

And then what happens? The, uh, does the challenge owner just take the ideas and um, pick them himself or herself or did they go to a committee or does that depend as well?

Speaker 4:25:16

That varies as well. And I think that's the new initiative we're sort of moving towards that mark was talking about it and sort of, it's hard to be more involved in that implementation [inaudible] decision making and even the implementation period and the concept of slam teams that, um, we heard about from some of your other customers. Um, I don't know if you want to take more that.

Speaker 3:25:35

No, I mean I think that's a right on as it's been in the past, we would let the sponsor just take it and be out to them to run it. Now we're looking to be more facilitators and not necessarily be the ones making decisions or really, um, necessarily even owning it. But it'd be more of helping them keep being transparent and keep the momentum I think is a big part of it.

IdeaScale:26:03

Yeah. Well it's interesting because you guys have sort of become crowdsourced innovation coaches at your organization. You've become experts in all of the things that ideas scale gets questions about all the time. You know, how do you improve engagement, how do you make sure ideas get delivered on? How is it that you involve leadership and decision making? It's really exciting. Um, I, we only have a few minutes left here. I did want to, um, give you the opportunity to tell us about your incentives program, which I think is really, um, interesting. But I also want to make sure that you guys get a chance to talk about anything else in your program that you think is really interesting as well. So, um, could you start by talking about the incentives and then say anything else that you think is special or unique about your program?

Speaker 4:26:51

I'm sure. So, unfortunately in the government we're very limited in the incentives that we can provide to encourage people to participate in a crowdsourcing challenge. And you know, obviously you'd hope that you'd want them to be inherently have stake in the game. So of course we participate, but we all know that humans are not like that and so very helpful and we've found that, you know, we've done some challenges with that incentive incentives and we've done challenges with incentives and the ones with incentives are certainly more or successful in terms of participation at least. Um, so to get around the barriers of not being able to pay people or get give them prizes or that sort of thing, we um, we sometimes we'll have an office director, whoever the executive sponsor is, um, we'll guarantee the target audience a one hour off if a certain participation percentage is reached that has been said beforehand.

Speaker 4:27:48

Um, sometimes we'll give sort of two or three people, either those that have the best ideas according to the executive sponsor or though just that we pick them at random for our time off awards. Um, sometimes we'll have that executive give up their parking space where we were [inaudible] valuable. It's kind of crazy, but it is. So, um, what are some of the, Oh, coffee with the executive sponsor is another one at lunch lunch with the executive sponsor. Um, so we were just trying to think about things that are legal right, that are also, um, thing if the people would walk.

IdeaScale:28:25

Yeah, absolutely. I just going to say, I mean nonmonetary rewards that certainly have value. I mean I'd love a parking space closer to the office. Sometimes

Speaker 4:28:37

deference is just a lot in the ward with the, with the objective. So you mentioned if a certain percentage of the office participates in challenges where it's really important to have participation in the crowd and walls more than necessarily the volume of ideas coming in. And that's where we set a high participation target and even up to 80% of the office participating.

IdeaScale:29:00

Wow. You can get 80%. Yeah.

Speaker 4:29:06

Well it works better for smaller audiences, but yeah. Yeah. Um, but then when we're looking for quality, um, that's where we look at the more individual based awards. And try to reward the people that have the best ideas. And another thing we've done when we have challenges that involve multiple divisions or offices, little as we'll have them compete against each other for participation rates or ideas that people at the highest participation rate, they'll get the hour off from the others. That kind of thing. Right.

IdeaScale:29:35

Wow. What a great way to, you know, game of fine, make it more competitive. Um, is there anything else that you think is unique about your program?

Speaker 5:29:46

Okay.

IdeaScale:29:46

Or anything else that you'd like to share?

Speaker 5:29:50

Hmm.

Speaker 3:29:50

Well, I've been fortunate, Kim mentioned arc dress supervisor. ACU is actually my direct supervisor now and the fortunate to been given the go ahead to spend more of my time on this. And in doing so, really thinks through a lot of the structure of the program, but particularly come here in idea scale and meet with the team and really works for you, the various problems, right?

IdeaScale:30:11

Yes.

Speaker 3:30:12

So for us it's always about finding new ways and better ways to do what we do and we're not willing to settle and rest is to keep trying to improve.

IdeaScale:30:23

Yeah. Mark's really been pushing crowdsourcing and CDER towards version 2.0 and he's really running with it, which is awesome. And you guys, the customer service at IdeaScale been fantastic. I mean really fantastic. And we couldn't have done this without, without you. We're pretty proud of that. We wish we had more time. We wish we had more people, but it is what it is. So.

IdeaScale:30:47

Well, you guys have a really inspiring story. I think. I realllly feel like it's really great to be able to create some of these changes that you guys have talked about, like new professional development programs or getting the 10% increase for your students. But, uh, I think what's also awesome is you're just changing the face of your workplace and I love that. I love that you're making the life better for the people that you get to work with at the FDA. So, uh, thank you for coming, you know, sharing a great story and coming onto the podcast today.

Mark Ascione:31:20

Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. It's been fun. Yeah. All right. See you next time.